Evaluation, testing, and maintenance of quality in a communications network, particularly transmission and communication connections in telephony communications, has become necessary and costly. This necessary tasks is driven-by the increasing number of people who have become directly affected by poor quality communication connections, and their need for a way to report the problem and receive an appropriate response in real-time.
A person or end-user in a communication connection can be the first to perceive or detect a degradation of quality in the communications network. Traditionally, this end-user might notify his/her network provider in order to report the problem and, then, wait for a subsequent contact or response from the provider regarding the problem. Also, the end-user might have to repeat the reporting several times to actually remedy all the existing quality problems.
Thus, a need exists for a method to acquire information in real-time from an end-user regarding quality communication performance and to produce a quality report for a communications connection in real-time. The endpoint user's perceived quality data or problem reporting can be used by the services provider to improve communication performance in real-time and to foster new services, applications, etc.
Communications providers, in addition to possessing the ability to receive accurate reports from an end-user, must be able to perform monitoring and testing in real-time to detect and respond to any changes in the quality of a link in the communications network. Previous methods for testing the integrity of the links in telephony systems have included the transmission of signals and frequency tests along a communications link. In addition, this testing can require lengthy durations and can lead to substantial delays in response times.
Thus, a need exists for an endpoint user to have the ability, in real-time, to provide information in an intelligent format to a communications provider, that will aid the communications provider in performing a required testing or monitoring of the connection and preparing a response in real-time using a quality information report prepared by the communications provider.
The present embodiments meet these needs.